The literary depiction of prostitutes and courtesans in early modern Spanish and Italian literature (15th-17th centuries) generally follows the misogynistic and patriarchal norms characteristic of the period. Female characters associated with sexual commerce (including go-betweens and procuresses) are presented negatively and tend to meet forms of punishment (death, public humiliation) in line with the moralizing parameters in which they operate. The dissertation centers on three works—the anonymous Carajicomedia (1519), Francisco Delicado’s Retrato de la Lozana andaluza (1524), and Pietro Aretino’s Le sei giornate (1536)—that go against the dominant moralizing representation of female sexual workers, even to the point of celebrating their mode of existence and behavior rather than condemning it. Male characters, in turn, are often presented in a disparaging light, challenging readers’ patriarchal expectations. The dissertation seeks to explain these anomalous works through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theoretical approach to François Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel (composed in the same period) whose fundamental characteristics closely conform to the popular-festive environment and practices of Carnival and related phenomena. The “logic” of Carnival is based on systematic transgression, on forms of symbolic inversion (the “world-upside-down”), and the celebration of the human body and its pleasures in a way that breaks the norms of an “official culture” as established by the Church and State. The dissertation strives to place the three works studied in the same unique sociohistorical context that enabled the genesis not only of Rabelais’s works, but several by Erasmus, Cervantes, and Shakespeare: all writers—according to Bakhtin—that activated the worldview of the popular-festive culture that surrounded them. The subsequent ambivalent, if not overtly negative, reception of the three works at the center of the dissertation is largely due to the inability of scholars from later periods to comprehend the precise sociocultural dynamics in play in their production—a fate similar to that suffered by Rabelais’s masterful Gargantua et Pantagruel. / 2026-10-01T00:00:00Z